Jan, it's good that you have someone dependable helping you 4 hours a week. It'll be good for Chris, too, if he can get some help from the son. I have some garden help, too, but my boundaries are that my helper leaves the irises and daylilies alone (except for maybe cleaning up dead daylily foliage), because (from previous experience) I can't trust him not to do something I won't like.
You gotta keep that plant lust under control, though! (Yes, I know I should talk, but look at all the trouble it's landed ME in! And yes, that includes cranking out too many seedlings!)
Lilli, sorry that you have vole problems. Maybe a solution would be, when you dig your new iris beds, to line that long trough/bed with a fine mesh wire screen, sort of like gopher caging but fine enough to keep the voles at bay. We've done that to a few spots here and the irises in such spots have thus far been unmolested. (The recent iris losses/attacks are in an area where it's a clump of iris here, a clump of iris there, and the clumps don't have caging to protect them.)
If you want to try more non-bearded irises, and if they would survive your climate (they are only good to USDA Zone 7a here), try an I. japonica or an I. confusa if you can find one. The flower habit is quite different from bearded irises and the blooms are smaller, but the plants are really lovely when in bloom, with multiple blooms open at any one time. They stay in bloom for about a month. Or you could try some I. cristata, which are much more cold tolerant.
